The old conflict between the doctor and the writer was renewed, and Chekhov decided on a response which might have been suicidal, both literally and artistically: in spring 1890 he set off on a journey across the freezing damp of Siberia to the penal colony of the island of Sakhalin, Russia’s Devil’s Island and Botany Bay all in one, to investigate the conditions of the prisoners there. The primary motive was certainly to demonstrate that he had more compassion for suffering humanity than any of the critics who accused him of indifference, of refusing solutions to the problems raised; the journey was also a flight from the inordinate demands of relatives, friends and mistresses; lastly, it was an emulation of heroism, notably of the conquistador–explorer, discoverer of the wild horse, Nikolay Przhevalsky, who had died in Central Asia and whose obituary Chekhov had just written, in the form of an anonymous panegyric.
The dividing line between Chekhov’s early and mature work is not a neat fracture point: ‘A Dreary Story’ has features of the mature work, just as the very last pieces take up themes, scenery and mood of the early work. If there is a temporal and spatial cut-off point, then the journey to Sakhalin marks it. Some elements disappear for ever from Chekhov’s works. First, there are now very few saints, heroes, villains, monsters. Evil resides not in single human beings, or even in families, but in a system. It was the prison colony, prisoners and guards, who made a collective eviclass="underline" the most horrific psychopath, murderer or hangman was as an individual the usual mix of the sympathetic and horrible. The reluctance to judge and categorize becomes absolute in Chekhov’s work after Sakhalin. Secondly, a poetic element that reminded Russian readers of the elegies of Pushkin and the metaphysical lyrics of Fyodor Tyutchev (1803–73), Russia’s most powerful if least prolific lyrical poet, enters Chekhov’s works. The absolute certainty of death forces characters to look at life with disbelief and even with renewed capacity for enjoyment.
A year spent abroad also gave Chekhov the benefits of a sabbatical. Very little of his work refers to, let alone is set in, Siberia or Sakhalin. (Likewise, for all his frequent and prolonged visits to St Petersburg, Chekhov only once set a story there.) On his return to Russia Chekhov did not settle down; the following spring he set off with the Suvorins on his first visit to Western Europe (another setting which he uses very rarely, despite four further visits, including almost an entire year spent in Nice). Not until summer 1891 did he suddenly revert to frenzied work, simultaneously writing The Island of Sakhalin, his largely unrecognized magnum opus, one of his longest, most ambitious stories, ‘The Duel’, and a number of explosive shorter stories.
The obsession with death in Chekhov’s work reaches its apogee in a story which appears at first sight to be just a fictionalized account of observations on his long sea journey, as he returned with a pet mongoose from Sakhalin to Odessa. The ship was carrying largely soldiers and guards returning from duty in the prison colony. One of them dies and the body is thrown to the sharks in the Indian Ocean. The tubercular man’s last moments and the extraordinary green light that suffuses the sky as his body goes overboard, however, makes ‘Gusev’ a work that, once read, cannot be forgotten. The green light (in fact, the colour green) is to permeate all Chekhov’s work, right until Natasha’s dress in Three Sisters, as a horrible omen of death.
The frantic summer spent in a magnificent country house at Bogimovo is perpetuated in many later Chekhov stories (for example, ‘The House with the Mezzanine’). The mansion still stands but is now a mental hospital for survivors of shellshock in World War II – as though Ward No. 6 had come back into reality – and its gardens are now a pig farm. It is as though Chekhov had determined to recover all critical reputation that he had lost during his absence over the previous year and a half. The result, ‘The Duel’, was the last major work he published in Suvorin’s New Times; over the autumn and winter of 1891 the story took up all the space that Suvorin had reserved for fiction, thus earning the resentment of those writers who now had no outlet.
‘The Duel’ is Chekhov’s most conventional work: it has two heroes who represent opposing sets of opinions, one precise, scientific and western, the other vague, intuitive and Slavonic; their ideological and moral enmity is crystallized in a duel which ends farcically. What clearer reminiscence of Turgenev could there be? It is hard to think of a major Russian writer of the nineteenth century who did not write a story that could have been entitled ‘The Duel’. Likewise, Chekhov has placed his characters in the claustrophobic setting of a Black Sea garrison town (suspiciously like Sukhumi), a Wild West setting (one might sometimes think) that lends itself to the taut plotting. The build-up to the duel (and even its apparently salutary consequences for both parties) also follows classical lines. The differences, however, are more important than the similarities to conventional duelling novels. For one thing, neither party’s views command much respect: they are rationalizations on the one hand of the aesthete (Layevsky) and his incurable idleness and on the other hand of the scientist (von Koren) and his involuntary hyperactivity. What distinguishes this ideological battle from those in Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy or Turgenev is Chekhov’s subtle authorial preference for a third way, the way of the inarticulate or uncomprehending non-combatants. The absurd mediator Dr Samoylenko declares that if he stopped loving a woman he would make it his life’s work to hide the fact, unlike the ‘honest’ cad Layevsky or the ‘honest’ bluff Przhevalsky-like conquistador von Koren. The Tatar innkeeper does not care whether people worship Allah or Jehovah, as long as they respect God. The naïve deacon interrupts the duel (over which an ominous green light is falling) and prevents a clear resolution of conflict. And not least, a group of indigenous Caucasians sit in a circle on the other side of a river by which the querulous Russians are picnicking and tell each other stories in a language which none of the colonists can understand. Doctor, deacon, Tatar and Abkhaz natives have an instinctive talent for peace and harmony which no proponent of any ideology can achieve – in this lies the novel and powerful import of ‘The Duel’ and it is thus that Layevsky’s absurd self-justification seems to accuse Tolstoy of hypocrisy and misogyny and scientific rationalism of brutal destructiveness. Above all, like Maupassant’s best prose, so the narrative of ‘The Duel’ is dominated by the sea: it drowns out soliloquies, it drives back the travellers. As in Chekhov’s mature work – ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’, for example – the sea represents a natural force not just more powerful but more significant than us, and those that recognize natural forces (the Tatar, the deacon, the doctor, the Abkhaz) have the advantage over the articulate intellectuals who occupy the foreground of the narrative.
If Sakhalin was the greatest trauma in Chekhov’s life, its consequences took time to make their mark. ‘Ward No. 6’, perhaps the most pessimistic work that Russian literature has ever produced, was not written until Chekhov himself had prepared what he hoped would be his own idyllic interlude, a refuge in the country. ‘The Duel’ with its reconciliation, even partial redemption, with its cast all alive at the end of the story, is a deceptively happy conclusion to the first period of Chekhov’s development.